What Does 'Rite' Mean in the Context of Christian Liturgy?by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Excerpted from The Spirit
of the Liturgy
(Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2000), pp. 164-167).

Rites are not rigidly fenced off
from each other. There is exchange and crossfertilization between
them. The clearest example is in the case of the two great focal
points of ritual development: Byzantium and Rome. In their present
form, most of the Eastern rites are very strongly marked by Byzantine
influences. For its part, Rome has increasingly united the different
rites of the West in the universal Roman rite. While Byzantium gave
a large part of the Slavic world its special form of divine worship,
Rome left its liturgical imprint on the Germanic and Latin peoples
and on a part of the Slavs. In the first millennium there -was still
liturgical exchange between East and West. Then, of course, the rites
hardened into their definitive forms, which allowed hardly any cross-fertilization.
What is important is that the great forms of rite embrace many cultures.
They not only incorporate the diachronic aspect, but also create
communion among different cultures and languages. They elude control
by any individual, local community, or regional Church. Unspontaneity
is of their essence. In these rites I discover that something is
approaching me here that I did not produce myself, that I am entering
into something greater than myself, which ultimately derives from
divine revelation. That is why the Christian East calls the liturgy
the "Divine Liturgy", expressing thereby the liturgy's
independence from human control. The West, by contrast, has felt
ever more strongly the historical element, which is why Jungmann
tried to sum up the Western view in the phrase "the liturgy
that has come to be". He wanted to show that this coming-to
be still goes on-as an organic growth, not as a specially contrived
production. The liturgy can be compared, therefore, not to a piece
of technical equipment, something manufactured, but to a plant, something
organic that grows and whose laws of growth determine the possibilities
of further development. In the West there was, of course, another
factor. With his Petrine authority, the pope more and more clearly
took over responsibility for liturgical legislation, thus providing
a juridical authority for the continuing formation of the liturgy.
The more vigorously the primacy was displayed, the more the question
came up about the extent and limits of this authority, which, of
course, as such had never been considered. After the Second Vatican
Council, the impression arose that the pope really could do anything
in liturgical matters, especially if he were acting on the mandate
of an ecumenical council. Eventually, the idea of the givenness of
the liturgy, the fact that one cannot do with it what one will, faded
from the public consciousness of the West. In fact, the First Vatican
Council had in no way defined the pope as an absolute monarch. On
the contrary, it presented him as the guarantor of obedience to the
revealed Word. The pope's authority is bound to the Tradition of
faith, and that also applies to the liturgy. It is not "manufactured" by
the authorities. Even the pope can only be a humble servant of its
lawful development and abiding integrity and identity. Here again,
as with the questions of icons and sacred music, we come up against
the special path trod by the West as opposed to the East. And here
again is it true that this special path, which finds space for freedom
and historical development, must not be condemned wholesale. However,
it would lead to the breaking up of the foundations of Christian
identity if the fundamental intuitions of the East, which are the
fundamental intuitions of the early Church, were abandoned. The authority
of the pope is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition.
Still less is any kind of general "freedom" of manufacture,
degenerating into spontaneous improvisation, compatible with the
essence of faith and liturgy. The greatness of the liturgy depends-we
shall have to repeat this frequently-on its unspontaneity (Unbeliebigkeit).

Let us ask the question again: "What does 'rite' mean in the context of
Christian liturgy?" The answer is: "It is the expression, that has
become form, of ecclesiality and of the Church's identity as a historically transcendent
communion of liturgical prayer and action." Rite makes concrete the liturgy's
bond with that living subject which is the Church, who for her part is characterized
by adherence to the form of faith that has developed in the apostolic Tradition.
This bond with the subject that is the Church allows for different patterns of
liturgy and includes living development, but it equally excludes spontaneous
improvisation. This applies to the individual and the community, to the hierarchy
and the laity. Because of the historical character of God's action, the "Divine
Liturgy" (as they call it in the East) has been fashioned, in a way similar
to Scripture, by human beings and their capacities. But it contains an essential
exposition of the biblical legacy that goes beyond the limits of the individual
rites, and thus it shares in the authority of the Church's faith in its fundamental
form. The authority of the liturgy can certainly be compared to that of the great
confessions of faith of the early Church. Like these, it developed under the
guidance of the Holy Spirit (cf. Jn 16:13).